Object specific armature deform

Problem

Currently, Deform can either be enabled or disabled for a bone. When parenting multiple objects using armature modifer to a mesh, it can be useful to use only specific bones of a mesh.

Examples

This may be useful for rigging of clothes.

A simple example are pants, which should never be influenced by the foot bones. But when using automatic weights, the foot bone weights will probably contain a few vertices from the bottom of the pants. Everytime you have to recalculate vertex weights, because you modified your rig, you have to repaint these vertex weights to belong to the lower leg again.

Some more complex example would be a foot rigged with toes, and a shoe, where you can see the toes. The shoe should not move when the toes are moved, but instead there is an additional bone for rigging the shoe more accurately., which does not affect the toes. This allows more control over the toes and the shoe front side independantly. The shoe bone and toe bones might influence each other for convenience, but the bone weights only belong to one of both for control.

Solutions

Additionally to enabling deform on a bone, it could be possible to select one or multiple meshes, the deform can will be applied to. I'd prefer a list of objects, on which the specific bone has no access, so by default, all objects will be influenced by every bone that implements "Deform".

Probably even more convenient would be options of "Make Parent > Armature Deform > With Automatic/Envelope Weights", which don't create new vertex group, but only change exisitng, the same way as if only these bones would deform.

In weight paint mode there could also be an option of "Assing automatic from Bones", which works as if only the selected bones have checked "Deform". Currently, the vertices that would belong to unselected bones will not be assigned to other bones instead, like it would happen, when they don't have "Deform" checked.